Seattle Demands White City Employees Confront Their Racism

Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights has developed a “race and social justice” curriculum on “institutionalized racial superiority” for all 10,000 city employees.

The program is designed to train white people only, according to documents obtained by independent journalist Christopher Rufo, Yahoo reports. In a series of tweets, he lays out the gist of the program, even sharing a powerpoint slide from the course that asks “What do we do in white people space?”

“I’ve obtained new documents from the city’s segregated “whites-only” trainings, which induct white employees into the cult of critical race theory,” Rufo wrote on Twitter.

“After attendees arrive, they must announce their pronouns and tell the trainers when they first became race-conscious—in other words, when they began their journey of internalized racism,” he added.

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In a follow up tweet he noted that the Office of Civil Rights urges white employees to process feelings of “sadness, shame, paralysis, confusion, [and] denial,” and then “take action to “redistribute resources, change who’s in power, [and] alter institutions.”

Participants are asked to examine how they benefit from “white supremacy,” how their “white fragility” is “showing up at work” and how “white silence” causes “harm to Black people,” Rufo tweeted.

As part of the training, employees explore how “white people internalize the system of white supremacy” through values of “individualism,” “intellectualization,” “objectivity,” and “comfort.”

It’s values such as these that must be “abolished from the work of city government,” Rufo wrote.

“Finally, white employees must implicate themselves in the system of white supremacy,” he tweeted. “They must share “a time in the past two to three months when [they] … caused harm to a person of color.” Once they have publicly established their guilt, they have completed the training.”

Seattle’s Civil Rights Office is not the only government agency requiring white employees to check their “privilege.” The Office of Civil Rights for the Los Angeles public transportation system has also encouraged employees to participate in discussions about “non-racism vs. anti-racism,” and “racial microaggressions.”